Disrupting Class

Christenson suggests there are two major forms of innovation: sustaining and disruptive. As consumer needs grow companies with develop products to meet those needs such as faster cars, higher resolution digital cameras, or c.d. players that can hold multiple disks. In fact companies will create products with more features than a consumer can use in an attempt to stay relevant. These product improvements are called sustaining innovations and the winners of sustaining innovations are almost always the current industry leaders.

Unlike sustaining innovations, disruptive innovations are not product improvements. In fact when disruptive innovations are first brought to the market they are not as good as the existing products. As a result the current customers have no need for them and the disruptive innovation’s original buyers are those who either did not have the knowledge to operate or the means to purchase the superior product. The first consumers of the disruptive innovation are what Christenson refers to as “non-consumers” because they were not purchasers of the original product.

In education one disruption is distance learning technology. I attended high school in a small rural school district. Like most rural schools we did not have the resources or the demand to offer many advanced placement courses. There was one option of taking an advanced chemistry course using synchronous video communication. Although this option was not as good as having an in-house teacher it was better than the alternative which was no class at all. The same type of distance learning courses is being offered in rural schools across the country.

Harris' presentation at NECC talked about how the surge of technology in classrooms has had little effect on how teachers teach. One possible reason is because they are largely crammed into the old ways of doing things. Teachers used them to help with administrative tasks such a keeping grades and taking role. Students would largely use them to write research papers. Although these are positive additions to the classroom it falls short of Christenson's vision of how technology should be used

Christenson also stated that technology should be used in a way that teaches students how they learn best. Christenson cites Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences believes that disruptive technology should replace standardized instruction with individualized instruction to meet the different intelligences that students have.

Christensen thinks that Web 2.0 technology will facilitate the creation of these instructional tools. Similar to iPhone applications, students and parents will build and share educational products that will meet the unique needs of individual learners. They recognize that these tools would not be as good as personal tutor or one-on-one teachers. However, these tools would not try to be better than personal tutor. They would be useful only to the consumers or those who could not afford a personal tutor. At first these tools only have to be better than the next available option which is no tutor at all. As this disruptive technology creates sustaining innovations it has the ability to completely disrupt the current model of instruction.

In Christensen's classroom the teacher will move away form the sage-on-the-stage and move closer to a guide-on-the-side role. Teachers will be needed to help students select and use these learning tools. Teachers will also need to adopt more of a cheerleader and motivator role in the classroom as each student uses the learning tools that best match their intelligences.
I agree with Christensen in a lot of areas. We can also see that technology is being used in a disruptive way with online education and the Khan Academy. However, the Khan Acadamy does not address individual learning styles. I am also not sure that students should or need to be taught according to their individual learning styles all of the time. I think that the Khan Acadamy model is similar to Christensen's vision, makes best use of the affordable of technology and the personal influence of the teacher, and is more practical to implement. I also disagree with Christensen's predictions of how fast public education will be disrupted. One prediction is that by 2019 half of all high school courses will be delivered online. He supports his prediction with several examples from industry such as the ipod, personal computers, digital cameras. However, public education is so highly regulated and resistant to change that I don't foresee that happening so quickly (not to mention that high school is used as a babysitting service).